Over the past several years, Texas lawmakers have kept themselves busy by launching multiple attacks on women’s health. In 2011 and 2012, state officials slashed family planning funding, repeatedly attacked Planned Parenthood, and enacted stringent abortion restrictions. Not so this session.

As the San Antonio Express-News reports, every single anti-abortion bill proposed in Texas this year was successfully blocked before it reached the House or Senate floor. Of course, that wasn’t for lack of trying — altogether, anti-choice lawmakers introduced at least 24 different measures to restrict Texas women’s reproductive rights. Some of those bills even had the backing of key leaders in the state, like Gov. Rick Perry (R) and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst (R). But Democratic members of the state legislature pushed back, and won.

“Democrats stuck together very well this session and made strong arguments and strong advocacy on behalf of a woman’s right to choose,” state Sen. Kirk Watson (D), the head of Texas’ Democratic caucus, told the Express-News. “Just this week, I’ve had pressure from leadership pushing to bring up bills in an almost threatening way, and we have stood up to that. …Now we’re at the end of the session, and they’re dead.”

The failed anti-abortion legislation included a “fetal pain” measure that would have criminalized abortion services after the 20th week of pregnancy, as well as several bills intended to force abortion clinics in the state to close their doors.

Democrats in the state explained that anti-abortion lawmakers experienced significant backlash during the 2012 elections, in the height of the so-called “War on Women.” Republicans took a “big hit” in that election, and the balance of the legislature tipped. After Texas voters continued to express disapproval over the new legislation that compromised women’s health, GOP lawmakers began to relent. They even agreed to work to reverse some of the family planning cuts.

Not every state had similar success defeating anti-choice initiatives, however. In the first quarter of 2013, state lawmakers proposed an astounding 694 provisions about reproduction — and some of them, including the most stringent abortion bans this country has seen since Roe v. Wade, became law this year.

On Wednesday, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) held an anti-abortion press conference for the bill he intends to reintroduce that restricts women’s abortion rights nationwide. A direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, Franks’ bill bans abortions after 20 weeks, before a fetus even reaches the point of viability. Just this week, an appeals court stuck down a 20-week abortion ban enacted by Franks’ home state of Arizona.

The lawmakers slated to speak today included nine House Republicans in addition to Franks — Republicans Chris Smith (NJ), Joe Pitts (PA), John Fleming (LA), Randy Weber (TX), Steve King (IA), Steve Daines (MT), Joe Wilson (SC), and Louie Gohmert (TX). Michele Bachmann (MN) was the only woman member of Congress listed for the event. Pictured above on the right is Susan B. Anthony List‘s Marilyn Musgrave and another non-member of Congress. Republicans have a history of excluding women from these conversations, like inviting an all-male panel to discuss limiting women’s access to birth control.

Capitalizing on the recent case of an illegal Philadelphia-area abortion doctor being convicted of murder, Franks recently expanded the scope of the bill beyond limiting DC women’s rights to women nationwide. Ironically, the case Franks cited actually proves the need to expand women’s access to safe abortion services.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit permanently struck down Arizona’s “fetal pain” law that would have criminalized abortion services after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The panel of judges determined that the 20-week ban is unconstitutional under Roe v. Wade, which guarantees the right to legal abortion until the point of viability at about 24 weeks of pregnancy.

Representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Reproductive Rights, who filed the lawsuit against the 20-week ban, praised the judges’ decision. “We’re glad the court has reaffirmed that states cannot place unlawful burdens on a woman’s right to access safe reproductive health care,” Talcott Camp, the deputy director of ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, said in a statement. Nancy Northrup, the president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, called the decision a “huge victory in the fight to protect women’s fundamental reproductive rights,” and noted that the Ninth Circuit’s decision should send a clear message to the other states that are attempting to limit abortion access before the point of viability.

Indeed, Arizona’s “fetal pain” measure — based on the scientifically-disputed notion that fetuses can feel pain after 20 weeks — is just one of several similar pieces of legislation to land in court. 20-week bans in Idaho and Georgia have also been blocked under the same constitutional logic. Arizona’s own law has actually been blocked since August, when the appeals court issued a temporary injunction right before the law was scheduled to take effect.

Imposing fetal pain measures is a popular anti-choice tactic to effectively chip away at Roe and narrow the window in which women may access legal abortion. Bans on late-term abortions are an especially big anti-choice priority right now, as abortion opponents attempt to capitalize on the high-profile case of illegal abortion provider Kermit Gosnell to misconstrue all later abortions as dangerous procedures. Just this week, Arizona Rep. Trent Franks (R), who has repeatedly attempted to impose a 20-week abortion ban on the District of Columbia, announced his intention to amend his legislation to push for a nationwide restriction.

When Arizona first passed its fetal pain law, it represented the most stringent abortion ban in the nation. Since the state defined gestation differently than other states, calculating from the moment of the woman’s missed period, the law could have potentially cut off legal abortion services at just 18 weeks of pregnancy. However, since Arizona first passed that piece of legislation last March, states have moved the goalposts even further. Arkansas banned abortions after 12 weeks, and North Dakota placed the cut-off at just six weeks of pregnancy.

On Monday, ThinkProgress reported that a 2009 bill introduced by Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain (R) would have required women to report an instance of “fetal death” to the police within 24 hours if it did not occur in the presence of a doctor. The implication behind that type of measure is, of course, that law enforcement should double check to make sure that the women experienced a miscarriage rather than induced an illegal abortion. Obenshain, who is now the state’s Republican nominee for attorney general, ended up striking the proposed legislation after concerns about the undue burden it might place on women who miscarry.

But even though that bill didn’t become law back in 2009, there are still some situations in the state in which miscarriages are treated as potential crimes. In fact, the Virginian-Pilot reported on Tuesday that two women have been charged with “producing an illegal abortion” after one of them gave birth to a pre-term baby who died shortly after birth. Witnesses allege that they overhead the two women planning to buy drugs intended to end the pregnancy:

Jessica Renee Carpenter, 20, and her friend Rachael Anne Lowe, 27, each were charged with one count of producing an illegal abortion, which carries a sentence of two to 10 years. Each also was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit a felony.

According to a search warrant affidavit, Carpenter was 25 weeks pregnant — near the end of her second trimester — when she went to Bon Secours DePaul Medical Center in labor April 11. The baby died about 20 minutes after he was born.

Norfolk Child Protective Services received an anonymous call reporting that Carpenter had intended to end her pregnancy. Police interviewed three friends of both women, who said Carpenter and Lowe wanted to end Carpenter’s pregnancy and that they heard them talking about buying items from a drugstore that she could ingest to do it, according to the affidavit. [...]

Carpenter has a ninth-grade education and was unemployed, according to court records. Lowe previously worked at the Tidewater Women’s Health Clinic in Norfolk, which performs abortions for pregnant women up to 14 weeks after their last menstrual period.

Under Virginia law, second-trimester abortions must be performed in a licensed hospital facility in the presence of a physician. Obviously, it’s important to crack down on illegal abortion providers who aren’t providing women with safe care, and — unlike Obenshain’s proposed bill — that’s likely the sole intent behind the state’s current law. But, if the allegations against the two Virginia women are true, the law will have the added effect of prosecuting a woman who made the choice to terminate her own pregnancy. The Virginia-Pilot notes that the only other “illegal abortion” charge on the books was back in 2007, when a man slipped abortion-inducing drugs into his girlfriend’s drink that caused her to have a miscarriage — an act that was obviously done without the woman’s consent.

Even if Carpenter’s miscarriage was self-induced, her case brings up questions about the criminalization of elective abortion procedures across the country. The mounting pile of state-level restrictions intended to restrict women’s access to abortion mean that some desperate women can’t get the reproductive care they need without making themselves into a suspect in the eyes of the law. That’s particularly true under late-term abortion bans, an increasingly popular anti-choice tactic to narrow the window in which women may obtain a legal abortion. If abortion is criminalized at 20 or 18 or even just six weeks of pregnancy, every woman’s miscarriage after that point could be a potential piece of evidence.

And of course, if Carpenter really did take drugs to induce an illegal abortion, it’s worth considering what might have led an undereducated, unemployed, desperate woman like Carpenter to make the choice she did. Perhaps she didn’t have the money for a legal abortion earlier in her pregnancy. Maybe she was too ashamed to make an appointment at a women’s health clinic. She might not have had any support from her friends and family, and she might have felt like she didn’t have any other options.

As the political fight over Obamacare continues, Republican legislators in highly uninsured states have turned their back on Medicaid expansion — despite the fact that expanding the public insurance program could extend coverage to millions of their constituents. Of course, even if stringently anti-Obamacare politicians refuse to cooperate with health reform, the law will still take effect. But that doesn’t necessarily mean those red states won’t feel the impact of refusing to add more residents to their Medicaid rolls.

Health care outcomes already vary widely across states. Unfortunately, health policy does too. The states that are already among the nation’s healthiest are the ones taking steps to ensure their low-income residents will have the insurance coverage they need — while the unhealthier, more highly uninsured GOP-led states are refusing to do the same. As an analysis from the Los Angeles Times points out, the health care reform law can’t change the fact that the stubborn lawmakers resisting Medicaid expansion are likely going to deepen the health disparities that already exist across the country:

With nearly every GOP-leaning state on track to reject an expansion of the government health plan for the poor, the healthcare law’s goal of guaranteed insurance will become a reality next year mostly in traditionally liberal and moderate states. These states already have higher rates of health coverage.

Residents of these states — concentrated in the Northeast, upper Midwest and West Coast — also have better access to doctors and are less likely to die from preventable illnesses.

Colon cancer deaths in states opposing Medicaid expansion, for example, are an average of 16% higher than in pro-expansion states, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of state health data.

Deaths from breast cancer are 8% higher on average in anti-expansion states. And adults under 65 are 40% more likely on average to have lost six or more teeth from decay, infection or gum disease.

An earlier analysis found that the governors for the most unsinsured cities in the United States have been resistant to expanding Medicaid. And even after some of those governors started to come around — most notably, Florida’s Rick Scott — the Republicans in the state legislature have continued to block the initiative. Opposition persists despite the fact that the poor Americans in the South, who are already being forced to delay their medical care because they can’t afford it, stand to gain the most from Medicaid expansion.

This isn’t the only example of health disparities becoming sharply divided by region. Abortion access, another area of health policy that’s largely been left up to states’ interpretation, also varies widely from California to Mississippi to North Dakota to New York. “It shouldn’t be that simply because you live in Mississippi that you don’t have the same health care that you can get if you lived in California,” one abortion doctor who travels to practice at Mississippi’s last remaining abortion clinic recently pointed out. Nonetheless, that’s the growing reality for the entire health care sector.

Not content with attempting to impose his anti-abortion agenda upon the women who live in the nation’s capital, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) now intends to push for a nationwide bill to criminalize abortions after 20 weeks. Franks, who invoked the illegal abortion provider Kermit Gosnell to justify his decision to re-introduce a 20-week abortion ban in DC, now says that Gosnell’s crimes have compelled him to amend his bill so it applies to women across the country.

The Arizona congressmember announced his decision to expand his bill on Friday. In a statement, Franks compared Gosnell — who has been convicted of killing of three infants that were born alive following botched illegal, unsanitary abortion procedures — to all late-term abortion procedures. “Had Kermit Gosnell dismembered these babies before they had traveled down the birth canal only moments earlier, he would have, in many places nationwide, been performing an entirely legal procedure,” Franks said.

However, that’s a gross mischaracterization of the state of legal abortion services throughout the country. Abortion opponents have repeatedly attempted to twist the facts surrounding Gosnell’s high-profile murder trial to make it appear as if his crimes are rampant throughout legal abortion clinics. But that’s simply not the case. The Philadelphia-area abortion doctor was guilty of much more than simply breaking Pennsylvania’s law that criminalizes abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy; he was also able to offer discounted prices for his services because he didn’t employ medical professionals or adhere to safety standards. Gosnell’s “house of horrors” isn’t analogous to the way that legal, sanitary late-term abortion clinics provide care to the women who need it.

Furthermore, it’s misleading to pretend that Franks’ quest to cut off legal abortion care at just 20 weeks represents a push to ban late-term abortions. In fact, 20-week abortion bans are a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade‘s guarantee of legal abortion rights until the point of viability, which is generally accepted to occur around 24 weeks of pregnancy. That’s why, after a handful of states recently enacted 20-week bans, several of them landed in court.

DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) has fought against Franks’ 20-week abortion ban every time he’s proposed it. She maintains that imposing abortion bans on the District of Columbia is a “stealth way” for abortion opponents to discreetly challenge Roe, since DC doesn’t have any representation in Congress. Now that the bill will apply to the rest of the nation, she remains committed to working to defeat it. “With the help of women nationwide, we defeated the D.C. abortion ban bill on the House floor last Congress. Now that the Franks bill will expressly target all U.S. women, we can expect an even stronger national response to this attack on women’s health,” Holmes Norton said in a statement.

Ironically, pushing to restrict women’s access to abortion isn’t actually an effective policy solution to prevent future Kermit Gosnells. If Franks and his anti-choice colleagues wanted to ensure that desperate women in other states don’t have to resort to illegal providers like Gosnell, they should actually be working to make abortion services more affordable and accessible to low-income women.

At the end of last week, three Democratic legislators renewed their efforts to protect women from right-wing crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), anti-abortion front groups that often use misleading advertising to market themselves as women’s health clinics. Sens. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) have reintroduced the “Stop Deceptive Advertising For Women’s Services Act,” which would hold those facilities accountable for any deceptive marketing tactics that falsely advertise abortion services they don’t actually provide. The measure encourages the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to crack down on the facilities that falsely advertise abortion services that don’t actually exist, while the organizations that are already accurately depicting their services wouldn’t be penalized.

Crisis pregnancy centers have a long history of preying on vulnerable women with medical misinformation. CPCs present themselves as a valid alternative to women’s health clinics, hoping to lure in women who want more information about their reproductive options, but they actually use conservative propaganda to dissuade women from choosing an abortion. And CPCs like to locate themselves close to reproductive health facilities — often moving in right next door — specifically to confuse patients who may be seeking an abortion.

“Deception has no place when a woman is seeking information about her health or a pregnancy,” Maloney said in a statement introducing the new CPC legislation. “While I will defend crisis centers’ First Amendment rights even though I disagree with their view of abortion, those that practice bait-and-switch should be held accountable so that pregnant women are not deceived at an extremely vulnerable time in their lives.”

Nevertheless, CPCs across the country have largely escaped accountability by citing those First Amendment rights. In cities that have attempted to prevent crisis pregnancy centers from lying to women, CPCs have typically been able to overturn those ordinances by arguing that any additional regulation stifles their freedom of speech. But there has been some slow progress lately. Last year, a judge in San Francisco ruled that CPCs don’t deserve constitutional protections for their misleading advertisements. And lawmakers in Oregon are currently advancing a measure that would require the CPCs in that state to explicitly disclose accurate information about the medical services they offer.

So far, the federal bill to crack down on CPCs has won the support of NARAL Pro-Choice America. “We know these crisis pregnancy centers lie to women in the moment they most need accurate information to decide the future of their pregnancy and their lives,” Ilyse Hogue, NARAL’s president, said in response to the bill’s introduction. “We’re thrilled that Sen. Menendez is taking action to hold these fake ‘clinics’ accountable.”

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Earlier this year, Arkansas Republicans overrode their governor to enact one of the harshest abortion restrictions in the nation, a 12-week ban that would criminalize one out of every 10 abortions in the state. But reproductive rights advocates are fighting back, taking the state to court and ultimately winning an injunction that will prevent the harsh law from going into effect.

The Center for Reproductive Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the ACLU of Arkansas all joined forces to file a lawsuit against the extreme abortion ban, which oversteps Roe v. Wade‘s constitutional right to legal abortion services until about 22 to 24 weeks of pregnancy. On Friday afternoon, a federal judge ruled that the 12-week ban — which was set to take effect in August — cannot be enforced while that legal challenge is still pending.

Nancy Northrup, the president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, praised U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright’s decision to grant the injunction against the law. “Today’s decision ensures that the women of Arkansas will remain protected from this blatant unconstitutional assault on their health and fundamental reproductive rights,” Northrup said in a statement. “Such an extreme ban on abortion would have immediate and devastating consequences for women in Arkansas, especially those who could not afford to travel out of state to access reproductive health care.”

Wright’s decision to block the 12-week ban comes just days after her decision to dismiss Arkansas’ request to drop the lawsuit. Wright sided against the state on Wednesday, ruling that the reproductive rights groups may continue with their legal challenge.

Arkansas’ stringent abortion ban is topped only by a new law in North Dakota, which would cut off legal access to abortion services after just six weeks — before many women even realize they’re pregnant. Both laws are “heartbeat” measures, which seek to criminalize abortion after the fetus’ heartbeat can first be detected — a random cut-off that isn’t based in any scientific definition of viability.